This is the first in a series of 101 articles intended as a short introduction of the system of vowel combination called sandhi, which Hindi has, in a fossilised form, inherited from Sanskrit. Since the system is fossilised, i.e. does no longer produce new...
We all know that the plural of foot is not *foots but feet. This is, by the large majority of English teachers and speakers alike, dismissed as an irregular feature shared by a bunch of other equally irregular nouns, but the formation of the plural of foot actually...
It will have escaped no one, that Germanic languages, such as English and German, have a very irregular conjugation of the verb to be. In English there is to be in the infinitive, but I am in the first person of the singular and then, out of nowhere, he/she is in the...
In the late stone age, about seven or eight millennia ago, the speakers of the cluster of related dialects that later developed into Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and most of the modern European languages, lived in a habitat where man, today the most influential and...
The common word for king is राजा (rājā) in Sanskrit, βασιλευς (basileus) in ancient Greek and cyning in Old English. But in poetic diction these languages also all share a number of very similar circumlocutions, i.e. descriptive terms or so called speaking...
In Greek literature the gods are known as the ἄμβροτοι (ambrotoi), the plural of ἄμβροτος (ambrotos), meaning immortal. Despite its different appearance, this word exactly corresponds to Sanskrit अमृतः (amṛtaḥ), which has retained a more original form, from the...
